


A Year

by Evandar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Past Underage Sex, Season/Series 03, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 21:05:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8300999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: When Dean confesses to selling his soul, Sam takes it a little differently. After all, their days together are now numbered, and all he wants is for his brother to be happy.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [furchte_die_schildkrote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/furchte_die_schildkrote/gifts).



> I loved all of your prompts and I had such a hard time deciding what to write. I hope you like the result! <3

“I couldn’t let you die, Sam,” Dean says. “I couldn’t keep living without you.”

“So I have to?” It would be so easy to be angry. Hell, he _is_ angry, because out of all the stupid, self-sacrificing things that Dean has done for him, selling his soul really tops the list. But he knows he would have done the same, if it were him, so…he wants to judge Dean. He does. He wants to call him every word for stupid under the sun, but he can’t. He can’t.

He looks down at Dean: at the back of his bowed head and his hands clasped between his knees and the faded motel coverlet beneath him, and he sighs. What’s done is done, and he’s not dumb enough to believe that the demons will ever let Dean’s soul go now that they’ve got it.

“I don’t want to fight,” he says. “I don’t want you to start spouting about how it was easy for me to live without you at college, either, because it wasn’t.” Dean snorts and opens his mouth to argue, but Sam talks over him. “I want you to tell me how long you’ve got. And then I want you to tell me – seriously – what you want to do in the time you’ve got left, because if I have to lose you then I want to remember you happy. I want to know that you got what you wanted.”

It takes a moment, but Dean does look up at him. It’s a look that Sam remembers and it hits him hard in the chest and for a split second he thinks he’s dying all over again, because it’s a look he’s not seen since before he left for Stanford. He’d thought…

Yeah, idiot him. He’d thought Dean had maybe gotten over that aspect of their unhealthy, co-dependent freak-show of a childhood somehow. That he _hadn’t_ somehow makes it easier as well as harder. He swallows. Dean looks away.

“That ship sailed, Sammy, you know that,” Dean says. “I’ll take living it up in Vegas with hookers and blackjack, though. And maybe seeing the Grand Canyon. Somehow never managed to see it.”

Sam shakes his head. “Grand Canyon I can do,” he says. “Hookers, not so much.” He reaches out. His hands slide over the soft flannel of Dean’s shirt and he feels his brother’s shoulders drop as he exhales hard. The muscles in Dean’s back are twitching, and Sam digs his fingertips in ever so slightly and begins to rub them through the shirt to try and ease the tension. 

“You know why Constance Walsh thought I was cheating on Jess?” he asks. “You know, the Woman in White from when we first went looking for Dad.”

“Put her hand through your chest, I remember,” Dean replies. “Figured it was, you know. College life. Sororities and all that.”

“Try thinking of me and not the last porno you watched,” Sam snaps back, and Dean’s lips twitch into something halfway between a grin and a leer. Sam pushes it. He steps forward, shifts his legs so that he’s straddling Dean’s lap the way he always used to when they were younger. Dean leans back. He moves his hands so that Sam can scoot forward and rests them on his thighs as if to prove tom himself that Sam is there.

It’s a conversation they’ve been dancing around for two years. A conversation they probably should have had around the time they met that faith healer in Nebraska, but that never really felt right.

“I loved Jess,” Sam says. “I wanted to spend a happy, normal life with her. But…I’m not a happy, normal person, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been in love with you since before I even knew what that meant.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Sap,” he says, even as his hands trace a path up Sam’s sides to slide under his shirt and trace the bare skin above his jeans. 

Sam drops his gaze, very deliberately, to the amulet. He’d meant it for their Dad when he’d got it from Bobby, but Dean had earned it in ways that their father had never really had a chance of doing. He’s been Sam’s world since he was six months old; his brother-parent-teacher-lover-everything. He hates himself for it more days than not; hated the way that even when he was with Jess, he sometimes dreamed about Dean and their fucked-up hunter upbringing and how sex felt better when it was less about apple-pie domesticity and more about making sure their Dad didn’t hear anything through paper-thin motel walls.

He leans down. He brushes his mouth over Dean’s in the barest whisper of a kiss. “Tell me,” he says.

Dean closes his eyes. “A year,” he says. “It’s the highest she offered.”

A year. _Shit_ but that’s nowhere near long enough. Sam nods even though Dean can’t see it. It’s never going to be enough, but at the same time, it’s about the amount of each other that they can take before the claustrophobia of their relationship gets too much. Hell, they were on and off enough as kids that any pipedream of together-forever died before Sam reached legal age – although that never stopped them from trying.

“Okay,” he says. _‘A year. A year. A year. A year.’_ It’s pulsing through his brain like some kind of twisted heartbeat. Not enough. He scoots up further into Dean’s lap, curls his body so that their noses brush and Dean’s eyelashes flutter. “A year.” _Fuck_.

“Yeah,” Dean says. His eyes open slowly. They’re bright and hurt and his hands are digging bruises into Sam’s hips, but _that_ isn’t enough either. He wants Dean to stay; to leave marks on him that will last forever. Dean’s already shaped his heart and head so he might as well shape his body too…

He kisses Dean again. Hard, this time, and deep. Their teeth clack and Dean practically snarls into his mouth, but it’s good – so good, so right, so _not_ right that it’s _perfect_ and –

A year. A year of this. A year of Dean in every way he can have him. A year of putting up with Dean’s cold feet and his blanket-stealing and having to weigh up every small town they pull into before checking-in as lovers or as brothers. One single year. Just one.

He can do that. And if he happens to find some crazy, unlikely, impossible way to make it longer? He just might be able to do that too.


End file.
